Security officials in Azerbaijan have arrested 22 people suspected of spying for Iran and plotting to launch terror strikes on Israeli and Western targets, the Central Asian country's national security ministry said Wednesday.
Without specifying when the suspects were detained, the the Azerbaijan national security ministry said in a statement that "firearms, cartridges, explosives and espionage equipment were found during the arrest."
The ministry's statement alleged that the detained suspects had received orders from Iran's Revolutionary Guards (Sepah) to "commit terrorist acts against the US, Israeli and other Western states' embassies and the embassies' employees".
All the detained suspects are Azerbaijan citizens. They are said to have been recruited by the Iranians from 1999 onwards and given training in the use of weapons and spying techniques at military camps in Iran.
It is not clear whether the arrests were made recently or in February, when Azerbaijan announced the arrest of another suspected terrorist group allegedly working for Iran's secret services. The Central Asian country had announced in January that it had arrested two people suspected of plotting to attack a Jewish school in capital Baku.
Azerbaijan, a predominately Muslim nation, is home to some more than 9,000 Jews and has close ties with the United States and Israel. Nevertheless, the Central Asian nation's close ties with Israel as well as its its reported purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons from the Jewish state have strained relations with Iran.
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